


Vows

by kmo



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Actually Married, Bedelia plays the long con, F/M, Pretending To Be Married, S3 wishlist, femdom if you squint, mentions of cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 17:37:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2278671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bedelia and Hannibal take their fake marriage very seriously.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. With this ring...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by the news that Bedelia and Hannibal will be posing as a married couple in s3 and also that she might betray him. Well, that is 2 things off my s3 wishlist right there! If I was in the Hannibal writer's room, this is the story I'd pitch.

Bedelia sat in front of her vanity, still dressed in the black velvet gown she had worn to the opera earlier that evening. A new production based on Dante’s _La Vita Nuova_ , she had found it a bit too post-modernist for her taste. Nevertheless, Hannibal had sat beside her and wept openly—whether at the beauty of the music or out of pain for his own lost loves, she could not say. In another life, she would have asked him what his tears meant. The glint of the plain gold band on her left hand reminded her that though they were no longer psychiatrist and patient, they were still bound together all the same.

The marriage was legal—as legal as a marriage between two people living under false identities could possibly be. They had stood before a priest and filed paperwork at the hȏtel de ville within a week of their arrival on French soil. Hannibal took great amusement in sanctifying their fake marriage—he had always had a fondness for profaning the sacraments. Bedelia suspected it had also been a test of sorts for her, to see how far she was willing to go. With Hannibal, failing such a test nearly always had fatal consequences.

He had kissed her on that day in the small Romanesque chapel and had made no move to touch her since. Her lips still recalled the feeling of his mouth against hers. His kiss was intense yet chaste, perfunctory but still sincere. Their entire relationship rendered in miniature.

Firm hands on her nearly bare shoulders called her mind back to the present, causing her to tremble in surprise. “I did not hear you come in, Hannibal.”

“Because I did not want you to,” he said, the edge of the predator creeping in to his voice. His right hand moved from her shoulder to the clasp of her necklace, index finger taking a brief detour to trace over a thin white scar, the souvenir of a lifetime ago. He unfastened the strand of antique diamonds with one hand and removed it from her neck carefully. The jewels, her gown—all gifts from Hannibal, all ever-present reminders of the bars of the bespoke cage he had built for her. “You looked lovely tonight. Thank you for accompanying me to the opera.”

“My pleasure.” As if she had any other choice.

Hannibal picked up the tortoise-shell hairbrush from the vanity. “May I?” he asked.

Bedelia’s stomach fluttered unexpectedly. Her eyes, thankfully, remained as cool and as deep as a mountain lake. “If you wish.”

Hannibal’s strokes were deft and gentle. She would not have expected anything less from the man who wielded both pastry brush and carving knife with equal artistry. His touch aroused a strange mixture of pleasure of danger, an umami blend of feeling she felt nearly every time they were alone together.

Midway through his task, Hannibal paused and set aside the brush to caress her blonde hair with his bare hand. It was more intimacy than they had ever allowed themselves in their eight months of marriage. Until that moment, she did not realize how much she had ached for it. “I was thinking,” he began with an uncharacteristic hesitancy.

“Yes?”

“We have been married nearly eight months and have not consummated our relationship,” he said with careful formality. Bedelia stiffened. “It may create legal issues.”

Not really knowing how to react, she aimed for humor. “Are you planning on asking the Church for an annulment?”

“No. But in the case that I am apprehended we could be forced to testify against one another. Which would defeat the purpose of having married in the first place.” Hannibal’s flimsy rationale for their marriage rested on the concept of spousal privilege.

“So, you wish to fuck me for legal reasons,” she said, deliberately choosing coarseness and vulgarity over the elegant speech Hannibal so preferred.

Hannibal said nothing. His reflection stared at her with his most unblinking, reptilian stare. He covered her left hand with his own large palm. The gold bands they both wore clinked against each other. She had bound herself to him but he had also bound himself to her. “I said the words, Bedelia. Would it surprise you that I meant them?” he said, his baritone thicker and huskier than usual.

Bedelia closed her eyes so that Hannibal would not see the trepidation in them. Another fatal test, another boundary crossed. How far had Will Graham been willing to go in the game he had played with Hannibal—as far as this? Will Graham had played a deep game, and had played it skillfully, but the thing he had lacked was patience. Bedelia’s patience could outwait a saint.

Hannibal’s long fingers slipped under the thin velvet straps of her gown. Brushing them aside with his thumbs he planted an inquiring kiss on her bare shoulder. She gasped at the contact. “I know you have not taken a lover in a very long time. Not since your attack, I think.”

Bedelia swallowed and felt an ache in her chest, close to her heart. “Longer than that.”

“Too long. And I feel I am somehow responsible.” Hannibal bent to kiss her other shoulder, lips just brushing the outline of her scar, causing her to shiver. “I am sorry my past actions caused you pain. I only now wish to give you every pleasure.”

In this stage of their chess game, this movement of their private symphony, there could only ever be one answer.

Bedelia eyes met her husband’s in the mirror, ice to his fire. “Words, Hannibal. I require deeds.”

He smiled back at her, one of his strange Cheshire Cat smiles. He bent his head to kiss the crown of her newly brushed hair, kissing his way downward till he captured the lobe of her ear between his teeth and caressed it with his tongue until she moaned.

Hannibal grasped her left hand fiercely and whispered as he nuzzled her neck, “With this ring, I thee wed. With my body, I thee worship…”

His hands and lips made their way further and further downward and did not stop until he had kissed the small arch of her stocking-clad foot. Hannibal knelt before her, obediently, expectantly, an impressive erection straining at the fabric of his fine wool trousers. Bedelia smiled back at him, all honeyed indulgence and deadly patience. Her own psychological sixth sense tingled, and she knew the tide had finally turned in her favor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm playing fast and loose with the legal concept of spousal privilege here, but really no more fast and loose than the show normally does with the law. In most states and in federal court, Bedelia could testify against Hannibal if she wanted to and vice versa.


	2. 'Til death

The smell of overpriced cologne and the scratch of a cane along his dungeon corridor unceremoniously intruded upon the silence of Hannibal’s memory palace. He was surprised still how very much it hurt to leave the sumptuous solitude of that place and find himself locked in a drab windowless cell of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Two months since his capture, and the pain still returned anew with each awakening.   
  
“Frederick,” he called, not bothering to open his eyes of rise from his cot. “Why are you darkening the doorstep of my cell this afternoon?”  
  
“You have a visitor.” Hannibal could hear the sneer within Chilton’s voice.   
  
“If it is a journalist or another tiresome academic, I am not interested.”  
  
“It’s your wife,” Chilton said, tone puckering at the last word.   
  
Hannibal’s eyes snapped open. Adrenaline and cortisol coursed through his veins and he found himself with a sudden craving for blood pudding, preferably sourced from the veins of his former psychiatrist and current spouse. She had played a deft hand, had played them all, he and the FBI in equal measure. “My wife,” he said with venom.   
  
“Do you want to see her or not? One would certainly understand if you didn’t, given that she manipulated you into getting caught,” Chilton said, taking an odious pleasure in seeing Hannibal so discomfited.   
  
“A man must honor his marital obligations,” he said, rising from his cot and smoothing down the wrinkles in his green prison jumpsuit.  
  
“ _Is_ she still your wife? I would have thought she would have filed for divorce by now…”  
  
“The lawyers are sorting it out,” Hannibal said, a half-truth if ever there was one.   
  
Chilton lingered, twirling his cane like a villain in a melodrama. “Such an intriguing woman, Dr. Du Maurier. A rare combination of brains and beauty. I was thinking of having her over for dinner—would be a shame if she got lonely while you were locked up in here,” he told him, his attempt at a leer obstructed by the scars on his face.   
  
Hannibal chuckled at Chilton’s blatant attempt to arouse his jealousy. “You are more than welcome to her, Frederick. Though I fear I must warn you—a woman like Bedelia, she’d have you for breakfast.”   
  
Chilton’s smile withered into a look of pale horror. “I’ll go and fetch her, shall I?”  
  
With Chilton gone, Hannibal slicked back his hair and donned what remained of his person suit after two months of incarceration. The click of Ferragamo pumps and a whiff of familiar perfume accompanied Chilton’s usual shuffle in a strange counterpoint down the corridor, punctuated by grunts and screams of obscenities by the other inmates. Though Hannibal had plenty of reasons to curse at his wife, from others it was a rudeness he could not abide. He made a mental note of the offending parties, saving his retribution for the proverbial rainy day.   
  
Chilton escorted Bedelia to Hannibal’s cell and Hannibal listened disinterestedly as he instructed her on all the safety procedures. She had not changed, and was every bit as elegant as the version of her he kept within his memory palace. He would never admit it to anyone, but he still talked to that image of her from time to time, as the therapists provided by the state hospital were as incompetent as they were tedious. It was his secret guilty pleasure, almost masturbatory.   
  
“I hope you understand a conjugal visit is quite out of the question in these circumstances,” Chilton quipped.   
  
Bedelia’s eyes flicked and she smiled thinly, her annoyance the mirror of Hannibal’s own. “That was never my intended purpose, Dr. Chilton. Now if I may speak privately to my husband?”  
  
Chilton’s eyes shifted nervously between the two of them. “Please call immediately if you need assistance. You have fifteen minutes.”  
  
“Hannibal,” Bedelia said simply in greeting after Chilton had left.   
  
“Bedelia. To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”  
  
“Concern and curiosity, I suppose.” Her eyes glinted in that familiar flinty way he remembered from their therapy sessions, those moments when she had picked away at the stitches of his person suit.   
  
“You betrayed me. Your curiosity matters little to me, your concern even less.”  
  
“And yet, you received me as your visitor anyway. Perhaps your own curiosity is at work here. I imagine Chilton’s hospital provides little to feed it,” she said, smoothing lock of hair behind her left ear.   
  
He saw it then, the gold band shimmering dully in the stale florescent light. His had been taken from him when he was apprehended along with the rest of his personal effects. “You still wear the ring I gave you,” he said, flatly.   
  
“Yes,” she answered. No further explanation fell from her lips.   
  
Anger and frustration swelled in his heart, his person suit bursting at its already frayed seams. Away from his carefully crafted environment, locked in this dungeon, it had become difficult for him to regulate his emotions. Locked in among society’s monsters, he became every day more and more the beast they thought him to be instead of the god that he was. “Why have you not divorced me?” he seethed. His lawyer had delivered the papers, but she refused to sign them.   
  
The cupid’s bow of her lips slid into a cruel smile. “I do not wish to. I feel… _protective_ of you, Hannibal,” she said, letting his own words slice into him with the precision of a scalpel.   
  
“Protective of me. I find that hard to believe.”  
  
“Responsible for you, then. You were my patient before you became my husband. You are a danger to yourself and to others. Confinement here was the most humane option for you.”  
  
He tasted bile in his mouth, probably this morning’s swill of microwaved meatloaf repeating on him. “You have an odd idea of what constitutes humanity, Dr. Du Maurier.”  
  
“So do you, Hannibal.”  
  
“We were…are…well-suited in that regard.” He paused for a moment, an insidiously clever plan taking shape in his mind. “If you choose to remain married to me, I fear it will cause problems for you. One would begin to question your mental health. No doubt Frederick would like to have us both. A matched set.”  
  
She smiled back at him, unfazed. “I said the words, Hannibal. Would you believe that I meant them?” His words again, her hand twisting the knife in his raw and beating heart.   
  
He rubbed the skin where her ring had once been and inhaled deeply. Crisp top notes of iris and bergamot rounded out by the richness of jasmine and sandalwood. The scent washed over him, intoxicating, shutting out the stale institutional air, taking him back to the sunny morning in the chapel when he had first kissed her. “For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health….”  
  
“’Til death do us part,” she said solemnly.   
  
Bedelia understood the stakes of the game she played with him, she always had. She stood there shining in the chiaroscuro of the corridor, like a diamond cast in a midden heap. She was the honey in the lion, sweetness masking her brittle strength. Sacrifice and savior in one. A worthy opponent to have for a mate.   
  
“I’m glad we understand each other. Please, my dear, have a seat, and let us enjoy the precious few minutes of conversation Frederick has seen fit to allow us.” 

Bedelia took her seat opposite him, sharp and knowing, and the game between them began anew.

 


End file.
